Interscript Comparison of Handwriting for Author Identification in Marathi Population

The India displays a high degree of religious, linguistic, cultural, racial, as well as geographical diversity. The languages spoken here belongs to several families in which major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by approximately 75% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by approximately 20% of Indians. There exist more than ten different scripts in India that are used for various Indian languages. The popular ones are Devanagari, Gurumukhi, Devanagari Gujarati and several others. The Devanagari script is used in Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, Maithili, Rajasthani, etc. Script is a particular style of writing. Basically, it can be comprehended as a symbolic representation of sounds of a particular language.

Giving opinion upon the authorship in various languages has always been a matter of debate. Hence, there is a need to study the similarities between the languages belonging to the same script for the purpose of comparative examination. In this interscript study, A total of 80 samples were collected; 30 male and 50 female. There were three scripts for each writer. The two languages Hindi, and Marathi belonging to Devanagari script was considered and correlated with the English language belonging to Roman script. The general features of Devanagari and Roman script such as alignment, letter size, slant, pen pressure, style, spelling errors, left margin, angularity etc. were studied in the samples provided.

In this study, we have tried to explain the similarities between the two different languages of same script as well as we have attempted the interscript comparison of handwriting for the purpose of author identification.